So I'm currently working my way through RTK. On frame number 三百 at the moment, and had a question.

I was wondering if it's okay to work on building my vocabulary a bit with something like core 2000 on smart.fm at the same time as RTK. The reason I thought it might be problematic is I sometimes see kanji on smart.fm that I'm not familiar with and I'm not sure if I could hamper my learning with RTK because of it.

The reason I want to do them both at the same time is I have a habit of only clicking good on かんじ that I just learned so I may review them again the next day, and verify that I really remembered them.

But after so many かんじ my reviews can build up to around 50-70+ for the next day, because that's how many かんじ I studied. And I don't always have tons of free time on weekdays because I have classes and homework to deal with. So I don't really want to pile my reviews up to high, but I still want to be doing something to further my 日本語 studies.

If I could start over, I'd do something like this: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...6#pid81476 (see also: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...2#pid99762 (follow up in that thread) ; rtk and suspendbycharacter ; swanki) ...

Dear Archy

Edit: don't take this personal, I'm just challenging you to think differently.

If you have to ask people permission to learn a language you are doing it wrong. The number one rule is to do what works for you, with emphasis on DOING. RTK is a tool to help you familiarize yourself with Kanji. If you check out ajatt that wacko says do the kanji and then study Japanese. Do that if you want. But if you don't want to do it that way and you feel that studying actual Japanese (which is the whole point) and doing RTK simultaneously works for you then do it. I personally had studied a bit of Japanese before RTK. It didn't hurt me one bit to study Japanese and RTK at the same time.

lots of luck

I actually tried to do Core 2000 before I finished RTK, and I after working a little at it I decided to wait and finish RTK first. I just found it much harder to do cards which had kanji that I didn't do yet with RTK. But, I had slow internet so I couldn't actually use the Smart.fm website at all, I was just doing it all via Anki. It might not have been as difficult if I could have also initially learned them on the website.

However, I don't belive at all that you should learn all the kanji before you start learning Japanese. Doing textbooks, or grammar study, listening/speaking, and of course studying hiragana/katana can all be done quite easily while doing RTK. In fact, I had been doing Japanese for a long time before I did RTK, and I thought it would be silly to stop. It was just Core 2000 that I found difficult.

I believe there's a sentence sorting thing now that will allow you to sort Core 2000/6000 in a way that'll prioritize earlier RTK kanji over later RTK kanji.

Just go slow, on the sentences and remember to add the meanings in the bottom portion(answer card). You can do sentences, but in the beginning take it slow. As long as you can identify the kanji meanings, or just add the meanings when you don't recognize them.

bizarrojosh: I hardly think Archy is asking for permission. He's merely wondering if it's a good idea to do certain things. I can remember when I first started out I was desperate for some guidelines as to what might work well and what might not work.

Which is what people in this thread are doing; giving guidelines, and then Archy can decide what works for him and what doesn't.

Koos83 Wrote:bizarrojosh: I hardly think Archy is asking for permission. He's merely wondering if it's a good idea to do certain things. I can remember when I first started out I was desperate for some guidelines as to what might work well and what might not work.

Which is what people in this thread are doing; giving guidelines, and then Archy can decide what works for him and what doesn't.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be mean but after re-reading my post I guess I did come off a bit harsh.

Arch, I think it's OK too, but I'd make RTK1 your first priority and get it out of the way as fast as you can. If you can get it done in 2-3 months, you can use RTK1 reviews to solidify what you've learned while stepping up your time in Core2000. It just depends on how much available time you have.

My 2 cents, but others may disagree...
I think core2k and RTK are mutually beneficial. It's much easier to remember kanji you have a context for, than when you try to learn them alone. Seeing kanji in words reminds you of its rtk tag, and your knowledge from rtk helps you more easily remember the vocab... a friendly feedback loop. I don't do vocab lists while doing rtk, but I do try to read a lot and pick vocab up that way.
That said though, I think it depends on how fast you want to do rtk. If you're gonna blitz it in a few months then i'd say doing core2k at the same time could cause burn out
great thing about doing vocab lists with rtk is that often you find yourself knowing a kanji before it even pops up in rtk ..

Thanks for all the responses. It's nice to know that I'm not necessarily hurting myself by doing that. My recently started program is 50 かんじ a day. And when I've finished that work on Tae Kims and Core 2000. I've been prioritizing Tae Kim so I can understand the structure of the language better.

I've lately been feeling really really motivated to learn 日本語 so I like doing as much as time will permit me. And Tae Kims is helping me learn a few compounds along the way. In the one lesson I did along with learning about positive and negative state of being I learned: 大人, 友達, 学生, 先生, 学校,小学校, 中学校, 高校, 大学. So that's kind of motivating in a way.

I also added all 300 かんじ that I've done in Anki so far to this websites SRS and went through them all in one sitting. Because there were some I didn't feel like I've seen in a while and wanted to test my retention. I had a 96% rate of correctness. So things seem to be going pretty well. =)

I have one final question though. simply regarding the reading of　日本語 would it be
にほんご or にっぽんご

I always thought that Japan in Japanese was にっぽん but I later found out that にほん also gives the かんじ for Japan.

にほんご pretty much always.

I found the best way to do core2k and RTK1 at the same time was actually to do RTK1 and Pimsleur Japanese at the same time. I was frustrated with the lack of japanese things to do while grinding through RTK, so I got Pimsleur to work on while I commuted to/from work. The pimsleur program itself is not going to teach you japanese, but what I found was that when I finished RTK, and moved on to Core2k, I already knew tons of vocabulary in Core2k. The sentences in Core2k that made use of vocab I learned in pimsleur were learned almost instantly. So, for example, in the core 2k step 1 deck, something like 700 cards were made up in whole or in part from pimsleur vocab. These cards were learned in no time. I'm finding the same thing with step 2. I guess for me, learning to read/write a sentence, while learning to hear/say it takes a long time. Learning to read/write a sentence I can already hear/say is trivial. Other people may experience something else, but for me, this was a big benefit.

Are there any Jpod 101 series that are open source or at freely available? I don't mean the "get trial membership, download everything" trick. I mean something that could legitimately be consider free for distribution by any means. If so, then yes, audio lessons of some sort are a decent thing to do while going through RTK. I did do Pimsleur during that time and did get some early benefits when I went from RTK to UBJG.

arch9443 Wrote:I was wondering if it's okay to work on building my vocabulary a bit with something like core 2000 on smart.fm at the same time as RTK. The reason I thought it might be problematic is I sometimes see kanji on smart.fm that I'm not familiar with and I'm not sure if I could hamper my learning with RTK because of it.

you can use the kore version of the smart.fm core series, which can be easily sorted by kanji in RTK order, that way you will only see words containing kanji that you've already learnt from RTK